THE WHEELS ON THE BUS

Buses in Suva are amazing. They have no windows, they run on noisy diesel engines and they blast out the latest popular tunes in Fiji. Unfortunately, there are only about five songs on continuous repeat: Justin Bieber’s “Baby”, Travis McCoy’s “Billionaire”, Iyaz’ “Solo”, Akon’s “Daydreaming” and this song that goes “One two, one two, one two, one two” and so forth... Bus routes are identified by the colour of the bus and different routes are owned by different companies. At 70 cents a trip, it’s the cheaper mode of transport so buses are crowded. This means that getting close and friendly to your bus neighbour is completely normal. The other alternative is that you sit on half of the seat to preserve respect for personal space. However, sitting on only half of the seat makes a good launching pad if the bus runs through a pot hole. I’d rather give up personal space.

Bus routes are not documented anywhere. However, everyone just “knows” where the buses go. Never ask a local if a bus goes down a particular road because locals don’t actually bother learning the names of roads. Places are referenced by landmarks, rather than street addresses. The routes are arterial-based and there are no round-circuit routes…either that or we are yet to discover them.

Today I found my favourite bus route: route 20 “Gaji Rd via Samabula”. It took about as long as it takes for a Fijian to saunter down the length of the 500m-long Ruve Street and was about as indirect and vague as the flow of a Fijian conversation. We chose this route because Gaji Road is a continuation of Ruve Street (the street that we live on). So naturally we were hoping that the bus would be able to drop us right outside our house.

The lesson we learnt today was that when the bus route says “Gaji Road”, it actually means: “we will be travelling the entire length of Gaji Road, do a U-turn, and then double back on the road we just went down and then travel somewhere else that doesn’t quite make sense”. See the diagram below for full details. In the end, we got off at the corner of Belo and Gaji Roads which was near enough to our house.




I’ll call it the scenic route home.